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Bleak Cabal
About A faction who don't even bother to preach, the Bleakers just resign themselves to facing life as it heaps its woes upon them. There's no Grand Meaning of Life, no Hidden Truth, not even a morsel of Hope left. Life just happens, and then it stops. Happy now? Being slapped in the face with your own insignificance and mortality doesn't do most cutters much good. In fact, the Bleakers take it upon themselves to look after the ones whose tiny insignificant egos couldn't face being pointless and lost the plot. They're all cared for in the Bleaker's Madhouse. Charitable sods, the factioneers also set up soup kitchens throughout the poorest areas of the Cage to care for the poor, the destitute and the down-on-their-luck. Just because there's no meaning to life, it don't mean you shouldn't help feed a hungry mouth, berk! So the Bleak Cabal take events as they come, trying to keep a grip on their sanity in a Multiverse slowly losing its own head. In time people will realise, when they finally get sick of looking for the elusive Answers. They'll never be found because they were never lost, see? They never even existed. And the sooner cutters realise this, the less suffering there'll be in the end... While the Cabal would like to shape people with their point of view, they don‘t force it on others. They don‘t even actively recruit members. Indeed, when someone approaches a Bleaker for membership, they just ignore them, even more so now that the Lady of Pain has seen fit to ban the factions from Sigil. Once the potential Bleaker realizes that all of the questions they‘ve been asking have not been answered because that is the answer, they are accepted. Most of the time potential recruits are members of other factions who‘ve lost faith in their creeds, and no longer see the point of their faction, its allies, or its enemies. It just ceases to make sense. And when you can‘t find anything to believe in, not believing in anything at all is rather appealing. History Around nine centuries ago, the Bleak Cabal sprung into being. Their philosophy of no philosophy appealed to a great many people, but confused a lot more, especially at first. When belief can shape everything round you, a belief in absence doesn‘t seem too out of place, but an absence of belief is outright insane. No one understands it until they don‘t understand anything anymore, at which point they can either choose to accept the harsh reality or go mad from the strain. Nothing makes any sense, so why keep on trying to force it? Instead, just focus on yourself, and see if you can find meaning there. Naturally, this appealed to the cynical planars that were tired of the factions and their philosophical wars, or those who found their own beliefs failing them. Thus the Cabal attracted those who had become lost in the clash of ideals, who felt abandoned for one reason or another by their faction or powers, those who were ready to give up. Most other factions never appreciated how the Bleak Cabal seemed to steal their members, even when it was clear the factions weren‘t doing enough to keep them. Still, with all the factions that have existed over the course of Sigil‘s history to oppose them, you‘d think that the Cabal would‘ve have been squashed…but there was always someone who saw that much opposition as a sign they were doing something right. Even at their all-time lows, the Cabal knew that when one faction or another got too big for their own good members would become disenchanted, and their own ranks would swell. This cycle has repeated throughout history, with their memberships rising and falling, and providing the Madmen a chance to be too big for their britches as well…often far too big, which caused some notable problems. When a Bleaker talks about the Grim Retreat, most people just think they‘re talking about a Bleak Cabal vacation. In a way, they‘re right. The Bleakers, constantly striving against that insanity inside of them, finally give up in large numbers and go on a little trip of the mind that often lasts them the rest of their lives. This happens, oddly enough, whenever the ranks expand too much. The overwhelming loss of belief causes insanity, which can‘t be dealt with efficiently by the few elders who truly understand it. This strange mental disease seems to start at the top and work its way down, with the factol usually the first to go. As it spreads through the ranks, the inexperienced new recruits are left behind, forced to drive the faction themselves while attempting to tend those Bleakers that came before them. They‘ve gotten smart over the years, however. They‘ve learned quite a bit about medicine and treatment, and now the recovery rate for its members is very high. And though there are still individual cases, the Bleak Cabal has not suffered a mass Grim Retreat in the past three decades, mostly due to the fact that their ex-factol Lhar made a point of keeping their membership at a stable number. Now, with the disbanding of the factions, they aren‘t even sure if one will happen again. They aren‘t even really a faction anymore, just a bunch of like-minded individuals accustomed to dealing with madness. This doesn‘t stop them from tending to the insane and the needy, and they continue to do so, now unofficially instead of officially. Many of the Madmen decided to make a trek to Pandemonium after the Lady declared factions against the law, and most of those never returned. Some are staying at or around the Madhouse, their faction headquarters on the first layer, to ward off any trouble from the lawful folks who have been sniffing around recently, asking about an artifact reputed to be able to bring back dead Powers. Some decided to settle in Windglum, a town on the third layer of Pandemonium. But whatever the reasons, it‘s reduced the amount of Bleakers in the Cage, but not by too much. It‘s not like things like this didn‘t happen all the time over the course of Bleaker history. Most people continue to view the Bleak Cabal as a bunch of barmies who are perpetually depressed. No one cared before to look at the intricacies of the Bleak Cabal philosophy, and now the only people who might care are those who have been swept up in the Faction Fever of learning everything about every faction and every factol. It‘s all over the place that ex-factol Lhar was always seeking his parents, but the Bleakers don‘t care, and neither does anyone else really. Apathy breeds apathy, and the Bleak Cabal is one of the few factions that didn‘t generate too much interest when Faction Fever started up.